Former Pump It Up! host Dee Barnes made history in the late ‘80s/early ’90s when she became the first woman to helm a Hip-Hop video show on a major network. But after she was infamously assaulted by Dr. Dre at an an album release party in 1991, she was essentially blackballed from the industry and left to her own devices to pick up the pieces.

Over 30 years later, the ripple effect from the life-altering incident continues to haunt her, and she’s currently scrambling to save her Pump It Up! archives from being auctioned off. 

On Tuesday, Barnes alerted her followers on social media that she was in a precarious situation with her storage unit company. As she explained via Twitter, “I need everyone’s help again with the archives storage to avoid auction this Thursday 10/13/22 PLEASE whatever you can.” 

With over 100 tapes of the trailblazing show potentially in peril, Barnes is at risk of losing three years of archival footage that captured the emerging careers of Queen Latifah, LL COOL J, Beastie Boys, Digital Underground, MC Breed, N.W.A, Ice Cube and many more.

“A lot of people started off there,” she tells ROCK THE BELLS. “Like Queen Latifah, LL COOL J — we were walking in the street. The footage is incredible. It’s really good stuff that I have. The Beastie Boys footage I have is rare because Adam [MCA] is gone and we just lost Biz [Markie], I have that. We lost Shock G, I have that. MC Breed, he’s gone. I have that. Trouble. I have that. It’s like I have all these people that are becoming ghosts now.” 

Barnes has been working on a documentary about the making of Pump It Up! and the aftermath of the Dr. Dre assault. But she’s been struggling to find a producer who’s willing to do it — and she doesn’t feel like that’s a coincidence.  

“I have been pushing for a documentary in time for Hip-Hop’s 50th anniversary but everyone wants to focus on Dre and I want to change the narrative because they’re erasing the historical aspects of the show and millennials literally grew up watching it,” she says. “It took me a long time to realize I was being blacklisted. At first I just thought it was doors weren’t opening and usually they did open. All of a sudden it became doors were shutting and nobody was being real.

“The only one who was real was [director] F. Gary Grey who didn’t cast me for Set It Off because of casting Dr. Dre. I was like, ‘Oh.’ I kinda shook that off as a one-off. I never thought it would be a continuing thing. It’s Jimmy [Iovine], he’s bigger and they didn’t want to offend Jimmy. This isn’t meant in a derogatory way, but he’s a giant octopus and his tentacles are everywhere, so they might not even like him but out of respect or out of not wanting to rock the boat, they don’t associate with me. I really didn’t think I’d be dealing with this all these years later.” 

Despite the controversy, nothing can erase Barnes’ legacy. Pump It Up! was on the FOX network before In Living Color arrived in 1989 and she has years of interviews with some of Hip-Hop’s most iconic artists. 

“They put me on after The Simpsons to keep up the momentum,” she says. “At the time, it was just Cops, America’s Most Wanted, The Simpsons, Married With Children, and Pump It Up! and I believe Joan Rivers and Tracey Allman’s shows. That was it.” 

Barnes, who was previously signed to Delicious Vinyl with her group Body & Soul, plans on telling the entire story in a forthcoming book tentatively titled Music, Myth and Misogyny: Memoirs of a Female MC. It will include FOX’s reaction to the assault and details on what exactly happened with Dr. Dre that fateful night. In the meantime, Barnes is still baffled by the difficulty she’s experiencing trying to get the documentary in the right hands.